Phil Klay’s book begins with a group of soldiers returning from a seven-month deployment. Soldiers on a plane with their guns unarmed between their knees left with nothing to do with their hands when required to hand them in. They carried their guns onto the plane but their bayonets were forbidden.
Returning home after seven months to find a wife 5 months pregnant, their home empty, their wife gone, their lives on hold, lacking purpose. Their memories haunted by what they had seen, friends they had lost, things they had done. Reaching for that gun which isn’t there. Resorting to alcohol or withdrawal in a vain attempt to cope. This writer evokes all this with a realism that makes it all too real for the reader at least in the initial chapter.
The author uses military acronyms indiscriminately without defining the terms which may lend authenticity to the story but is confusing to the uninitiated. The narrator would seem to be Sgt Ozzie Price though names are rarely used here. And so I discover that the narrator changes from chapter to chapter because this is a book of short stories not a novel. And, like so much of the best fiction written about war, written by someone who never served on the front lines. Most who did do not want to talk about it or if they do many years after the fact. Since this author didn’t serve at the front he probably tries too hard to make it real hence the acronyms among other things that make this book difficult to assimilate. For example the chapter titled OIF?
When the author drops all the jargon this isn’t a bad read. He has a feel for his topic. He has worthwhile things to say about how a Chaplain, a Catholic Priest, handles a disillusioned soldier; about how a vet explains his war experience to a fellow student post-war. To soldiers war has nothing to do with the political reasons for waging it; it’s about surviving and supporting the fellow soldiers in your unit whether or not you like one another. What he has to say helps makes it clearer why suicide now accounts for more casualties than combat itself.
Returning home after seven months to find a wife 5 months pregnant, their home empty, their wife gone, their lives on hold, lacking purpose. Their memories haunted by what they had seen, friends they had lost, things they had done. Reaching for that gun which isn’t there. Resorting to alcohol or withdrawal in a vain attempt to cope. This writer evokes all this with a realism that makes it all too real for the reader at least in the initial chapter.
The author uses military acronyms indiscriminately without defining the terms which may lend authenticity to the story but is confusing to the uninitiated. The narrator would seem to be Sgt Ozzie Price though names are rarely used here. And so I discover that the narrator changes from chapter to chapter because this is a book of short stories not a novel. And, like so much of the best fiction written about war, written by someone who never served on the front lines. Most who did do not want to talk about it or if they do many years after the fact. Since this author didn’t serve at the front he probably tries too hard to make it real hence the acronyms among other things that make this book difficult to assimilate. For example the chapter titled OIF?
When the author drops all the jargon this isn’t a bad read. He has a feel for his topic. He has worthwhile things to say about how a Chaplain, a Catholic Priest, handles a disillusioned soldier; about how a vet explains his war experience to a fellow student post-war. To soldiers war has nothing to do with the political reasons for waging it; it’s about surviving and supporting the fellow soldiers in your unit whether or not you like one another. What he has to say helps makes it clearer why suicide now accounts for more casualties than combat itself.
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